It Only Takes Hackers 60 Seconds to Steal Your Identity, Here’s How You Can Prevent It

Giovanna was born in Rome, Italy and currently resides in South Salem, New York. In her free time, she likes to cook with her children and grandchildren.

Sixty seconds. In the time it takes to heat up a Hot Pocket in the microwave, your identity can be stolen by cunning online hackers — and that’s according to one of the biggest names in the (illegal) business.

Kevin Mitnick, the most infamous and once most-wanted hacker in the world, explained how hackers operate and offered advice on how people can protect themselves from identity theft in a segment on The Rachael Ray Show.

“One of the worst things people do is they choose their own passwords,” Kevin said, “because people don’t have really good creativity in doing so.”

Kevin pointed to Sarah Palin as an example of such oversight. The former Republican vice presidential nominee’s email account was hacked in 2008 by a college student who simply guessed her password reset question, “Where did you meet your husband?”

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to all this scariness: Just use a password manager that generates a secret, random phrase for you.

“There’s very popular ones out there — LastPass, 1Password, there’s KeePass, there’s Password Safe — and it’s so cool, because if I go set up an account on a website, [the password manager] automatically generates a random password, fills it in for me… and every time I revisit that site, it just fills it in for me,” Kevin explained.

If you are going to choose your own password, just be sure to use a phrase or set of characters that’s really long, such as a line from a song. That might just be enough to keep the baddies at bay!